Open source technologies can reduce technological dependency, but software alone does not create digital sovereignty. Sovereignty also depends on governance, interoperability, shared standards, long-term maintenance and sustainable economic models.

France Université Numérique (FUN), the French public operator for online higher education, has developed a national digital learning ecosystem built around open-source technologies and shared infrastructure. Through Digital FCU, FUN and 19 public universities are now using this ecosystem to develop and distribute a common national offer of online professional training and micro-credentials.

This talk will share lessons learned from this large-scale experiment: how open-source learning technologies can be combined with common pedagogical standards, accessibility requirements, online purchasing, certification and inter-university governance to transform fragmented institutional initiatives into shared public digital infrastructure.

The main lesson is that digital sovereignty is not achieved through open-source software alone. It emerges when public institutions have the capacity to collectively govern, operate, maintain and evolve their digital commons.